Empty Summer Twilight by Patrick Bocarde

Shaded blondes, torn jean shorts

and loose t-shirt wait on dirtbikes

for me to pass the bike path

crossing Linden Street, Massapequa Park.

Frilled leafy trees snap

at my car windows like a mad Expressionist painter.

A squirrel starts across the streets,

pausing before darting off asphalt.
Telephone lines—black whipcords—slash

the sky into acres

as full of grazing buffalo

as any American plain.

A bird feeder, clear

cylinder offering only air,

sways to a stop
inside an evergreen.

A bluejay squawks for his free lunch.
I crash into a '72 Buick.



—from the chapbook "Suburban Fuck Farm Anonymous" by Patrick Bocarde

Carousel by Kori Sayer from the chapbook Dr. Turpentine

picture by richard schemmerer

I dreamt my life in terms of science


last night I threw a cigarette into the black blue
and you caught it 25 miles away
I'm grinning like a maniac into hair and rain
as you bring your arm back down and strike a match
We're talking through seemingly occupied space
seemingly... right?
wrong
this is one of those hard to perceive angles
where you are bigger and more dimensional
than your surroundings
that perfectly deceptive angle
i pose to one side
like so
and you do the same
when we do this
everything else is flexible
the stars will spin in circles
and the trees will go flat
you could be in China
and that ciggerette would still make it
to your mouth
because when you and I move
the earth stays right there
gravity doesnt know we're meaning
to let it win the race
we like it fast
we like sitting on that bench
and having the world mold for us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ4Xa_6B9to&feature=plcp

poetry found a living room



Ross William Hamilton, The Oregonian



sharpening knives with no reservations, the teacher anoints the teacher's fountain with righteous words as the painter tapes the plastic down. a couple ascend the stone stairway to the parking lot’s rooftop performance of dusk in july is an egg broken high above a concrete bowl and we are it's audience, dazzled by fading shine. the past arrives without a past, passing like a train that won't slow down as the dusty old salesman with his too translated book scurries by in his pinstriped suit, carrying the world on his back. isn't everything done and said, instead? the singer never asks. cartoons of diversity panel the plywood covered walkway downtown, the unaffordable and undesirable never sit & sip, together or still. out of the corner of my lazy eye, a handsome japanese couple tag team their toddler's pants off, replaced with swim trunks for the wading pool, where the unfortunate city slurps it's colors scraped on black square plates, giving the music color he says, the various feeling of the poets dictates to the painter, who declares all reasonable offers will be refused. i see we are stalked by fingerprinted skin like predator reconsidering our boundaries. the plastic chain stand collapses from the force of the painter's brute sincerity, slash & gash, he dabs the waiting mouths of distinct color as the wind stripes ripples across the moist eye of the reclining cyclops, and pigeons swoop the bowl where we sit pondering all that you, all that you scraped across your life, just to tease the eye with texture. he confesses his fandom with borrowed lines as hysterical preteen girls scream in swimsuits re-enacting the horror films they shouldn't have stayed up for the man who hasn't been able to sleep on anything soft in years does not really know the woman he sleeps with. the painter conjures with a swipe of his hand, and just like that, an emerald comet appears as the train wheezes past again with its icecream cone sigh, like an elderly star too tired to shoot, dragging itself in shame beneath its sky. an adolescent girl in denim shorts, worn over black lace stockings, florid with roses,  drags a chair into the center of the pool where sits, posing like a star jealous of our moon. delicacies or dry mouth delirium is no choice at all, cornered shadows saturated in shiny silences, slipping like spaghetti straps off a shoulder of sheer brick and we have been discovered by wind as they, the children run again into the pool to discuss the rules of their improvised play. no singer has ever been fired for moaning too many baby's he thinks, these towers of stone interrupted with predictable blinks of glass have all gotten jesus turned the other cheek. wind ripped what it could from the backs of our kneeling skeletons, assembled to expose like warm bellies giving themselves to the sherbet sun. waving goodbye, i feel the evening creeping with its delicate cool, menacing the small game of our affection. time to leave; i have a job to do, stapling the neighborhood with posters of regret.

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/index.cfm?c=52454

The Wild Flower Man by Lu Yu (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

Do you know the old man who

Sells flowers by the South Gate?

He lives on flowers like a bee.

In the morning he sells mallows,

In the evening he has poppies.
His shanty roof lets in the
Blue sky. His rice bin is
Always empty. When he has
Made enough money from his
Flowers, he heads for a teahouse.
When his money is gone, he
Gathers some more flowers.
All the spring weather, while the
Flowers are in bloom, he is
In bloom, too. Every day he
Is drunk all day long. What does
He care if new laws are posted
At the Emperor's palace?
What does it matter to him
If the goverment is built
On sand? If you try to talk
To him, he won't answer but
Only give you a drunken
Smile from under his tousled hair.



-from the book "The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry"
edited by Eliot Weinberger
http://ndbooks.com/book/the-new-directions-anthology-of-classical-chinese-poetry

Change by Vern Rutsala from The Moment's Equation

In agate type the sports page lists

Transactions—so and so traded,

someone put on injured reserve,

another waived out of the league.

Such lists uncover the sadness

of change and separation—our
own lives dwindling into fine print

with the aging bonus baby

sent down to double A, his great

hopes and ours a faint blur

on page four. We think of such players

gone to a kind of limbo, bat

and ball denied them, carrying

only their scuffed shoes down some road

of sore arms and bad knees. We eke

out our days among the injured

reserves—like us they may be fit

some day—but feel ourselves sliding

toward the saddest of all,

that invisible leavening of all
trades during the hot stove league,
players who don't even have names,
the players to be named later.

from the book, "The Moment's Equation" by Vern Rutsala

http://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/snyder-series/the-moments-equation

DON'T ASK ME ABOUT THAT FALL

Fuck it. Cold October

nights rocked the Columbia

as details hazed. Lights

shattered on the river. What

they call reflections. Sex

no longer Mystery but what

dripped from our cigarettes inside

the teeth of the colossal wind.

The stars sprayed out like tic-tacs

on the reckless river. My coat

held open just across your beating back

as if I wasn't stopped by everything, the wind

straight through us like screen doors

banged by wind. Lights shattered

on the river, and who wasn't reckless.

Steeped in the force of fall, nobody

ever questioned. As for myself,

I shoved against you, rough as tides

at every push. And as for you, it's best

your daily blackouts wash away

the way we gambled everything

with holes in both our pockets,

shooting the indifferent moon. As if

we could change anything, as if we had

-from the chapbook "Smithereens" by portland poet Starlite Motel
http://www.nightbombpress.com/

Day Labor by Jim Shugrue

Day Labor

At an age when friends desert you

going over to the dead, what is there to do?

Sit in your house surrounded by old books

while the senile republic reminds you

there are worse things than death.

Wood smoke drifts over the winter landscape,

picnic tables covered in blue plastic tarps, who knows

what the neighbors are thinking? Who knows who's harmless,

who armed to the teeth plotting revenge? I watch the birds

at the feeder for hours at a time. Their appetites,


their rivalries. How they survive the winter here.
Nervous, contemplative, a little, it seems, confused,
but eating, living, being the one thought they have.
And I'm somewhat less than them, though I too serve
to fill the cylinder with seeds.



-from the chapbook, "Floating Verses," published by barebone books

http://www.poetry.us.com/jimshugrue.html